GOP's Christopher Buckley backs Obama

WASHINGTON, Oct. 11 (UPI) -- The son of the late U.S. conservative icon William F. Buckley says he's voting for Democratic U.S. presidential nominee Barack Obama.

Christopher Buckley, a staunch Republican and columnist for the conservative National Review magazine, revealed Friday that for the first time in his life he will vote for a Democrat for president next month, CNN reported.

"It's a good thing my dear old mum and pup (sic) are no longer alive," Buckley wrote on the Web site The Daily Beast. "They'd cut off my allowance."

Buckley said Obama, a U.S. senator from Illinois, "has in him -- I think, despite his sometimes airy-fairy 'We are the people we have been waiting for' silly rhetoric -- the potential to be a good, perhaps even great leader. He is, it seems clear enough, what the historical moment seems to be calling for."

Buckley said he is dropping his support for GOP nominee Sen. John McCain of Arizona because the presidential campaign has changed him, CNN reported.

"It has made him inauthentic," Buckley wrote. "A once-first class temperament has become irascible and snarly; his positions change, and lack coherence; he makes unrealistic promises..."